Good morning, Quartz readers!
This year is the 10th anniversary of the global financial crisis. To mark the occasion, the US Congress has dismantled some of the regulations put in place in the aftermath to prevent history from repeating itself.
In an unusual display of cross-party unity, Democrats and Republicans came together this week to loosen banking rules and reduce the number of lenders considered systemically important—that is, “too big to fail”—under the 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, a landmark law passed in the shadow of the crisis.
It’s the latest in a series of moves by the Trump administration to make America’s banks great again. Tax cuts enacted at the end of last year have boosted profits across the industry: American commercial banks generated a record collective quarterly profit of $56 billion in the first quarter, according to new data. Some $6.5 billion of that was thanks to a lower tax rate, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC).
As the US economy gathers momentum, with historically low unemployment, the Federal Reserve, following its mandate, is tightening monetary policy by hiking interest rates to guard against overheating. This stands in contrast to the tax cuts, regulatory rollbacks, and other stimulus measures coming from the fiscal side. Martin Gruenberg, chairman of the FDIC, warned this week that banks must be ready for the “inevitable downturn” that follows the latter stages of an economic expansion.
There are timely warnings elsewhere about what happens when complacency sets in during the good times. Some emerging markets that gorged themselves on dollar-denominated debt are in trouble now that the dollar is strengthening as US interest rates rise.
Although currency mismatches aren’t an issue for the US, American households are on the hook for a record $13 trillion in debt. Ominous research by the IMF published earlier this year traced economic cycles over the past 300 years, identifying a perpetual progression of booms that led to deregulation that preceded financial meltdowns. In other words, three centuries of history suggests that now is the time to strengthen supervision rather than water it down.—Eshe Nelson
Five things on Quartz we especially liked
The Venn diagram between libertarians and crypto bros. Both pride themselves on values of minimal government interference and maximum individual gain (as well as being overrepresented by white dudes). As Georgia Frances King writes, it’s no wonder that the “hippies of the right” and some corners of the crypto community have become one and the same.
Can the cult of Berkshire Hathaway outlive Warren Buffett? Corinne Purtill traveled to Omaha, Nebraska to find out. She spoke with people who came to Berkshire’s annual meeting because they always have, or because they never have, or because they feel an urgent sense of an era drawing to its close.
We’ve given up in the search for an Alzheimer’s cure. There hasn’t been a new treatment in over a decade because, although dementia isn’t a disease itself, it is caused by many. Katherine Foley notes that for every question answered about Alzheimer’s, two more appear, making the condition like a hydra that modern medicine struggles to tackle.
The White House has a sinkhole. Don’t laugh. After one was spotted by a keen-eyed reporter on the North Lawn, Heather Timmons tracked its social-media moment. She explains that while Washington, DC has been called a swamp, it was also literally built on a swamp and could sink as much as six inches this century.
White fear of black people is actually a power play. Several recent incidents have highlighted the ways in which people of color are made to feel unwelcome everywhere. As Aamna Mohdin writes, the phenomenon is no accident—rather, it’s the contemporary version of US segregationist policies, and an attempt to regulate black people’s access to shared space.
Five things elsewhere that made us smarter
An eulogy for Philip Roth. “Sheer energy—Roth’s central gift and the quality he shared with America itself—is his legacy to literature, and it will always be there,” Zadie Smith opines in the New Yorker. A day after the passing of the great American writer (paywall), she recalls her very personal memories of visiting him in retirement, borrowing books, and discussing American history.
Britain reckons with Russia’s dirty money. Embarrassed when questioned in front of the UK’s Foreign Affairs Committee in March, the Guardian’s Oliver Bullough attempts to put some figures on the scale of Slav influence in London. That includes some surprising stats, like that Russians contribute $64 million a year to Britain’s posh private schools.
Using taxis to explain winning at basketball. Houston Rockets general manager Daryl Morey sold his Lexus and now takes an Uber everywhere because it is cheaper and a better use of time. For the Wall Street Journal (paywall), Ben Cohen uses Morey’s mentality to help us understand his team’s current success against the Golden State Warriors. (Morey also uses a—gasp—BlackBerry.)
An ode to code. A middle-aged journalist working for the Economist, Andrew Smith decides it’s time to learn how the software that governs our lives actually works. But which of the 1,700 programming languages should he choose? Writing for 1843 magazine, Smith recounts the journey of eventually getting good enough to build an app.
The disappearing bando banquets of Taiwan. These feasts allowed immigrants from the Chinese mainland to create new social networks to replace the families they left behind—and are now part of the inaugurations of the presidents. For the South China Morning Post, Steven Crook and Katy Hui-wen Hung explain how rising affluence has curbed this tradition.
Our best wishes for a relaxing but thought-filled weekend. Please send any news, comments, surprising sinkhole locations, and Taiwanese banquets to hi@qz.com. You can follow us on Twitter here for updates throughout the day, or download our apps for iPhone and Android. Today’s Weekend Brief was edited by Kira Bindrim and Kabir Chibber.